Brokeland may be a long way from New Orleans, but it too proves vulnerable to the effects of Katrina’s destructive surge. When the floodwaters receded, they left behind the tangled wreckage of lives and communities, revealing a landscape that was also denuded of its ideals. The spectacle of unevenly distributed suffering in places like the Superdome emphasized that the dream of diversity is not immune to the cycle of destruction and renewal, and that change can go either way: sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. In Telegraph Avenue, as I’ve written elsewhere, it functions as “an echo from the future, made all the more poignant by our foreknowledge of what is to come, progress and calamity both—a black president, yes, but rising floodwaters as well” (Kavanagh). Telegraph Avenue thus illustrates the value of a reflective nostalgia by returning to our recent past in order to illustrate the contingency of the present.
Notes
Works Cited
Amidon, Stephen. The New City. New York: Anchor, 2000. Print.
Bloom, Nicholas Dagen. Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Print.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Print.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Picador, 2001. Print.
———. “Fountain City.” McSweeney’s 36 (2010): i–viii, 1–95. Print.
———. Gentlemen of the Road. 2007. Toronto: Anchor, 2008. Print.
———. Manhood for Amateurs. Toronto: Harper, 2009. Print.
———. Maps and Legends. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. Print. The essays “Diving into the Wreck,” “Maps and Legends,” “Imaginary Homelands,” and “Landsman of the Lost” are included in this volume.
———. A Model World and Other Stories. 1991. New York: Harper, 2005. Print.
———. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Harper, 1988. Print.
———. “Obama & the Conquest of Denver.” New York Review of Books. 9 Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Nov. 2012.
———. “Obama vs. the Phobocracy.” Washington Post 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.
———. “O. J. Simpson, Racial Utopia and the Moment That Inspired My Novel.” New York Times 27 Sept. 2012. Web. 9 Nov. 2012.
———. Summerland. New York: Miramax, 2002. Print.
———. Telegraph Avenue. Toronto: Harper, 2012. Print.
———. Wonder Boys. New York: Picador, 1995. Print.
———. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: Harper, 2007. Print.
Foster, Dennis. Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature. New York: Cambridge, 1997. Print.
Fowler, Douglas. “The Short Fiction of Michael Chabon: Nostalgia in the Very Young.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995): 75–82. Print.
Kavanagh, Matt. “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Rev. of Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon. Globe and Mail 15 Sept. 2012: R18. Print.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father. 1995. New York: Three Rivers, 2004. Print.
Olsen, Joshua. Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2003. Print.
Rouse, James. “It Can Happen Here: A Paper on Metropolitan Growth.” Conference on the Metropolitan Future. University of California at Berkeley. 26 Sept. 1963. Columbia Archives. PDF file. 22 Jan. 2013.
1. Fountain City itself does more than name the phenomena; it also serves as one of these “objective correlatives.” The product of several years of interminable labor, it was eventually abandoned by Chabon in 1992 as being terminally flawed. In 2010, it was partially resurrected and published in fragmentary form by McSweeney’s, along with explanatory notes from the author: “What I found, more than any salutary wisdom, was a strangely intact record of my life during the time I was writing the book, a bubble of ancient air trapped in the caulked hull of the sunken novel” (“Fountain City,” vii).
2. The Nathan Shapiro stories in A Model World are a particularly good example of this—for a useful discussion of nostalgia in Chabon’s short fiction, see Fowler.
3. Chabon is a remarkably generous writer whose willingness to share his personal history in a number of thoughtful and reflective essays provides useful autobiographical context in a way that elucidates the mysterious veil separating fiction from fact without seeking to tear it away. “Certainly Chabon’s fiction seems to spring out of biography—and if it does not really spring from biography, then his fiction’s seeming biographical source is a triumph of his real-making imagination” (Fowler 82).
4. “The words ‘once upon a time’ are in part a kind of magic formula for invoking the ache of this primordial nostalgia” (Manhood 68).
5. The British are a good example of this, but in situations where a potent sense of one’s nation fails to correspond to the state one lives under (like, say, the Irish at the outset of the twentieth century), nostalgia proved a source of division rather than unity.
6. Chabon explores the appeal of the memorabilia industry in an early scene from Telegraph Avenue:
“Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist” (20).
7. In a related vein, consider this riff from Telegraph Avenue: “Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human” (374).
8. Boym provides the following examples: heimweh (German), maladie du pays (French), mal de corazon (Spanish), litost (Czech), toska (Russian), tesknota (Polish), saudade (Portuguese), dor (Romanian) (12–13).
9. I owe the remarkable concision of this formulation (“the limit creates the beyond”) to Dennis Foster, albeit in a much different context (12).
10. “I had known fairly soon after beginning work on the book, within the first twelve to eighteen months, that something about it was, in the technical parlance of writers, fucked” (“Fountain City” v).
11. As Boym puts it: “The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot” (49).
12. Chabon also fondly recalls a scale model, a city in miniature, laid out in the Exhibit Building—one of three structures designed for Rouse by a young architect named Frank Gehry (Olsen 189).
13. “Childhood is a branch of cartography,” he writes in Manhood for Amateurs (61).
14. The novelist Stephen Amidon grew up in Columbia around the same time as Chabon and was similarly shaped by the experience. He explores its legacy as a tragedy of soured idealism in the novel The New City, which is set in the early 1970s and takes place in a thinly fictionalized version of Columbia called Newtown (as in the postwar “new town” movement that inspired Rouse’s efforts). In some respects, The New City reads as the book Chabon never wrote—or rather, has spent his career writing his way around—a narrative of the fall from grace rendered directly and powerfully in realist terms, stripped of the distortions of Chabon’s at times overpowering nostalgia.
15. To some extent, Chabon’s change of residence seems preordained. The closing lines of Wonder Boys drop in on a revitalized Grady, indulgent father and productive writer, working hard “on a memoir of Berkeley in the early seventies” among other things (367).
16. There is the example of Zelikman the Frank and Amram the Abyssinian in his medieval adventure yarn Gentlemen of the Road. There is also The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s counterfactual history of the Jewish Diaspora. It imagines a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska, one established after the nascent state of Israel is overwhelmed by its enemies in 1948. In Chabon’s parallel 2007 (the same year the novel itself was publi
shed), the precarious status of the Sitka Jews is made manifest by Reversion: the federally mandated expulsion of the Jewish community from their home. Against this backdrop, Chabon crafts an exquisite noir featuring Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner and cousin Berko Shemets who face the uncertainties of a twenty-first-century exodus together.
17. The region is well acquainted with violent upheavals of natural origin like the 1989 Loma Prieta “World Series” earthquake as well as man-made ones. It served as cradle to two of the pillars of 1960s countercultural radicalism: the campus activism sparked by the Berkeley free speech movement and the black power militancy embodied by the Black Panther Party. More recently, Oakland has played host to one of the more vociferous Occupy encampments, which has played its part in returning the topic of economic inequality to the national conversation.
18. It is an experience that the author attempts to reproduce in literary terms in the third chapter of Telegraph Avenue (“A Bird of Wide Experience”) that stands out from the rest of the narrative in that it consists of a single sentence, albeit one twelve pages in length, told from the perspective of a parrot (239–50). Unexpectedly released after the death of its master, the pet bird makes its escape, winging its way across Telegraph Avenue. In its flight, it provides a mobile point of view that rests on one character and flits on to the next, capturing them on the hoof, as it were, as they go about the business of living. It is a bravura sequence, an extended stream-of-consciousness riff that blends and commingles perspectives, bringing everyone together as an unwitting chorus.
19. Significantly, the blackmail is made possible by Luther’s possession of a bloody glove, in a sly nod to one of the incriminating pieces of evidence that somehow failed to convince a jury of O. J. Simpson’s guilt. Echoes of Simpson’s spectral presence are also evident in the character of Gibson Goode, the media mogul whose plan to bring his franchise of music megastores to Telegraph Avenue threatens to drive Brokeland Records out of business. Like Simpson, Goode is a former NFL star and a native son of the Bay Area.
20. “Having grown up in the black part of Richmond with a black stepmother, black friends, black enemies, black lovers, black teachers, and culture heroes who, barring a few Jewish exceptions, were almost exclusively black,” Nat is both about the author’s age and shares much of his background—Richmond is only about 140 miles from Columbia, Maryland (Telegraph 189).
21. Chabon has written about being in the audience for Obama’s speech in Denver where he accepted the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, an experience that is highlighted for the author by Obama’s oratorical skills, which he likens to a form of free jazz. “Obama was a virtuoso, employing many different registers—preacherly, plainspeaking, jocular, Lincolnesque—to sound common notes, in a regular but loose-feeling progression, like a piece of Ornette Coleman harmolodics,” he recalls. “Sometimes he paused, inclining his head, listening to the words, hearing just before he said them how they were meant to sound” (“Obama & the Conquest of Denver”).
Index
A
academic novels, 1.1-1.2
“
“Admirals,” 1 , 2.1-2.2
A
Adorno, Theodor, 1
adventure fiction, 1 , 2 , 3
age studies, 1
Alexander, Lloyd, 1
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1
Allen, Woody, 1
Allingham, Margery, 1
“
“Along Frontage Road,” 1 , 2.1-2.2
A
alternative history, 1 , 2 , 3
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18
An American Tragedy, 1
Amidon, Steven, 1 See also Columbia, Maryland
anti-Semitism, 1
Asimov, Issac, 1
atheism, 1 , 2
Atwood, Margaret, 1
B
Bailey, H. C., 1
Bakhtin, M. M., 1
Balz, Douglas, 1.1-1.2
Barreto, Eduardo, 1 , 2
Barsoom stories, 1
Barth, John, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
baseball, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 George Carlin on, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Batman, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
Beatles, the, 1
Behlman, Lee, 1
Bellow, Saul, 1
Benedict, Elizabeth, 1.1-1.2
Beneke, Timothy, 1
Bengtsson, Frans G., 1
Bester, Alfred, 1
Big Lebowski, The, 1 and ideology, 1.1-1.2
and the 1960s, 1
See also masculinity
Blaikie, Andrew, 1
Bloch, Ernest, 1
Bly, Robert, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Bonhomme Richard, 1
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1 , 2
Boym, Svetlana, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 See also nostalgia
Brainard, Joe, 1
Brett, Simon, 1
Bright, Amy, 1
Brod, Harry, 1.1-1.2
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, 1
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 See also Tarzan
Butler, Judith, 1
C
Cain, James, 1 , 2 , 3
California, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13
Cambodia, 1
Campbell, Joseph, 1 , 2 , 3
Capra, Frank, 1
Carter, Jimmy, 1
Catcher in the Rye, 1
Chabon, Michael and academic research, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
creative writing programs, 1.1-1.2
interviews, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
reflexive modernity and, 1 , 2
relationship to literary studies, 1 , 2.1-2.2
as storyteller, 1
See also individual novels and short stories
Chandler, Raymond, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
Chesterton, G. K., 1 , 2 , 3
Christie, Agatha, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Chute, Hillary, 1
Clay, John, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Clinton, Bill, 1 , 2 as a celebrity, 1.1-1.2
dominant figure of the 1990s, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2
and image, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Coen, Ethan and Joel, 1
Cohen, Josh, 1.1-1.2
Cohen, Malachi B., 1
Colbran, Louise, 1
colportage, 1
Columbia, Maryland, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15
comics, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 and America, 1.1-1.2 , 2
as co-mixture of art and commerce, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
as co-mixture of word and image, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2
See also The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; The Escapists; Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist; “The Strange Case of Mr. Terrific and Doctor Nil”
communal identity, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4
communication, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Conrad, Joseph, 1
Cooper, Susan, 1
Coover, Robert, 1
Crichton, Michael, 1
Crofts, Freeman Wills, 1
Cultural Gerontology, 1
“
“D.A.R.E.,” 1 , 2
D
Davidson, Avrum, 1
Delfonics, the, 1
DeLillo, Don, 1 , 2 , 3
Detection Club, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
DiBattista, Maria, 1
Dickens, Charles, 1 , 2
Dictionary of Imaginary Places, 1
discrimination, 1
“
“Diving into the Wreck,” 1 , 2 , 3
D
divorce, 1.1-1.2
Double Indemnity, 1
Douglas, Michael, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
Downey, Robert Jr., 1 , 2
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9
, 10 , 11
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